New Musicals in Manhattan

Knights of Song (by Glendon Allvine; produced by Laurence Schwab) is a musical show about the most famous of musical showmen, Gilbert & Sullivan. Besides providing a chance to go to town with their music, a play about them has comic and dramatic opportunities: Sullivan's long love affair with married, U. S.-born Cynthia Bradley; the violent wrangling between the two collaborators, who could not work peaceably together nor successfully apart; Queen Victoria's affection for genial, diplomatic Sullivan (John Moore), whom she knighted in 1883; her aversion to jealous, crusty Gilbert (Nigel Bruce), whom it was left for her son, Edward VII, to knight belatedly in 1907.

All this Playwright Allvine has strung together in a series of scenes which include chunks of H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, introduce canny Impresario D'Oyly Carte, and evoke the artistic life of Victorian London. To garnish his text, Allvine has cribbed all the celebrated remarks of the day, making his chatter sound at times like a page from Bartlett's Quotations: Bernard Shaw pipes up with ''Some day Wagner will rank with Shakespeare and Shaw," Queen Victoria freezes her guests with "We are not amused," Whistler snubs Wilde with "You will, Oscar, you will." A bright, attractive Gilbert & Sullivan crazy quilt, Knights of Song fails to be anything more because it does not treat its subjects as they invariably treated theirs : with style. The scenes from Pinafore and The Mikado are performed with a second-rate stock company's fatal excess of enthusiasm. The picture of Queen Victoria has none of Gilbert & Sullivan's crushing dead-pan mockery of pomp & circumstance. Only Actor Bruce knows the secret, plays Gilbert with a polished griffness that the old boy himself would have acknowledged with a snort of delight.

Knickerbocker Holiday (book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson: music by Kurt Weill; produced by the Playwrights' Co.) represents an ill-balanced musicomedy collaboration, suggests the most fleet- footed girl at a prom dancing with a corpulent middle-aged professor who has hopefully taken a few lessons from Arthur Murray. To the story of Xieuw Amsterdam in the days of peg-legged Pieter Stuyvesant. the famed author of Mary of Scotland and Winter set has contributed a thick Dutch cheese of a book, while Composer Weill (Johnny Johnson) has filled Knickerbocker Holiday with gay, spirited, catchy tunes.

Satire at present is making a wallflower of sex in the musical field, and Knickerbocker Holiday shrewdly woos the reigning favorite, gives Nieuw Amsterdam and Pieter Stuyvesant a queer suggestion of the New Deal and F. D. R. Dutchman Stuyvesant (Walter Huston) is pictured as a would-be dictator outraging the hit-or-miss "American" who hates political systems, hates to take orders.

. . . hates and eternally despises

The policeman on his beat

And the judge at his assizes.

Says one of the Early Americans: "Let's keep our government small and funny."

Many a first-nighter wondered a little at Playwright Anderson's hosannas to the virtues of muddling through, for Anderson had pictured his muddlers as lily-livered, rum-smuggling grafters and lynchers. So cynical an attitude also clashed violently with his strongly social-minded Winterset, with his militant Gods of the Lightning. It appeared that Anderson's more serious feelings about democracy had been slaughtered to make a Knickerbocker holiday.

But it is Composer Weill, with his delightful music, and Actor Huston, gaily spinning about on his peg leg, who provide the holiday.

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